Comments on: Green Room: April 1, 1996http://blog.hulu.com/2011/04/01/green-room-april-1-1996/
Tue, 26 Aug 2014 20:31:57 +0000hourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.0.22By: Danhttp://blog.hulu.com/2011/04/01/green-room-april-1-1996/comment-page-1/#comment-107581
Thu, 14 Jul 2011 16:12:26 +0000http://blog.hulu.com/?p=3306#comment-107581It costs a bank money to set up and manage those ATMs (land in the best places, equipment, loading, unloading, accounting). Why should they provide free service to their competitors?

On the other hand, in my city, through a series of 3 mergers of the largest banks in the area, a single bank now has almost all of the good locations.

There are 2 solutions to this:
#1) The ideal solution: Break up Bank of America.
#2) Force all banks to sell their ATMs, except those inside their own branch offices, to a private company not involved in retail banking, and with the appropriate but not excessive regulations, let them sell the service at the same price per customer to all participating banks.

(This does not mean that the customer will be charged for the service, since the banks are already paying at least as much to manage their own ATMs.)

I believe in free market capitalism, but given that there are a limited number of good locations in our cities (and suburbs), which are already very built up, a competitive market is not possible, precisely the type of situation where this level of regulation is justified in free market economic theory.